


witch oil

by plantagenet



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Gen, Yuletide 2013, did somebody say 'world building'?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 15:42:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plantagenet/pseuds/plantagenet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s a gentle practice in deceiving one’s own child in order to stay his questions (and an even gentler one when it comes to raising someone else’s child), the same way there’s a poetry to learning, at a point, that one’s own parents were occasionally full of shit.</p><p>(A gyptian's view of the world, when there was still just one to worry about)</p>
            </blockquote>





	witch oil

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bearthing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bearthing/gifts).



There’s plenty to see from the water, that’s what the landlopers miss. They build their cities to face outwards, like actors on a stage. They pretty them up out front to greet the roads and city lanes as they roll in from the country. But paper peels on the river’s side, and from the canal you can see the wires and the pins and the errors; the weak spots, and the parts the spotlight never finds. A city’s all paper dragons and cut-out moons once you see it from behind. But if you lay out a map of England, all tender and pale like a body stripped of skin, you’ll see it’s a living thing. The rivers and canals all fan out as far north as the coal hills, far south as the sea. They are blue lace. Capillaries. They turn mills and feed fields. They are a bloodstream.

Watching from the rivers, the world beyond the water’s edge is photogram-frozen. When you only float into Oxford once a year, you notice the difference twelve months can make.

This mother here, with the wood pigeon dæmon, was an unsettled maiden last summer. That scholar, bent over his books, was drunk in a gutter. Twelve new headstones wink from the graveyard behind St Barnabas church. There’s a red-haired boy living in Juxton Street now when there was never one before.

It doesn’t take long to figure all is temporary - joy and terror, both. She hardly remembers when she figured that out, but it must have been early on in life. No one ever explains these things out loud. Like how you only learn to play doppel cards if you watch how it’s done. Like how gyptian kids get taught stories - they don’t get taught arithmetic or how to read verses, or how to read at all, even. They don’t get taught not to swim in the river, because they’ll just learn it themselves soon enough.

At first, a bright one will think up the plan and then ten more will follow on, letting their dæmons skip and swim as silver eels or slippery fish through the inky dark water, and then, by tea time, they’re all sick with stomach cramps and retching up over the stern. They leap onto the banks and send their dæmons up into the air as swans or ducks, all curious and fluttering, to watch the locks cranked open and the water falling down, and that’s how they learn anything that’s worth learning in their world.

She reflects on her gyptian’s wisdom from the table in the kitchen of the little cottage in the country, wondering how she came to be moored here.

The floor is cold stone tiles; the ground beneath her feet is still as a corpse. There’s nothing to see through the cottage windows but for the odd errant sheep and the empty dirt road snaking out through the fields. Behind the main house is a meadow, hemmed in with bright foxgloves, and she was told she can walk through it and down to the river. But it’s little more than a stream, in truth, and hardly a familiar sight. No vessels float by, no canary-yellow narrowboats piping out cinnamon-smelling smoke or giving off the glow of home.

It’s hard to sleep and dream of home in a bed that don’t rock you through the night. You wake up breathless, scared by the stiffness and the lack of heartbeat knocking about in the earth below.

In the library, which faces the road and the main house, is a rocking chair. The movement’s pale mimicry of the river’s sighs and sways, but it comforts her to sit in it in the evenings, with the little baby tucked up in her arms. The walls of that room are lined with fresh, fat books. If she knew her letters, she’d read to the child to sleep each night, but as it is, she’s illiterate, so the baby gets told the same tales her mother told her. About the West and East winds, and the marsh ghosts. About how there are forests to the far north flying full of witches, and how the mother moon watches over them and washes them in icy light.

But everything here is stagnant, frozen over and unchanging. There’s a reason gyptians don’t trust still waters. It’s where dead things collect and thick witch oil bubbles belch in the deep. The cottage don’t feel safe, she thinks, in the dark and the pulseless quiet. She knows of nothing here. No news comes from Oxford, or from London. The world might have boiled over and sloughed away for all she knows. The silence is a fog - it blinds her.

Occasionally, there are birds in the sky overhead, which give her a sense that the world beyond continues apace. There’s a black crow that takes up roost in the ash tree behind the house, and she wonders if that’s an omen for good or for ill. She never quite learned for sure.

She tells little Lyra the story.

She was thirteen the year they saw the witch’s dæmon for the first time.

They were in Oxford for the summer Horse Fair, and she and her cousin, Bernie, were sitting up on the roof of her parents’ narrowboat, watching the Jericho streets like a great and busy ant farm, trapped under the glass. Their dæmons danced together as dragonflies between the mooring posts.

She was Mary Johansen then (Mary - like the Mother; the irony ain’t lost). Her brother, Benjamin, was five years dead - executed, on account of having killed a student over a girl they both fancied. She knew the smell of blood and the bright, bitter taste of injustice, therefore, and half the landloper kids were terrified of her. _Benjamin Johansen’s kid sister with her coil of black hair and her red scarf. She’ll beat any boy at a running race and she ties oyster knots tighter than your granddad ever could._

It was that day that the red-haired boy in Juxton Street, who lived in a shop with a bronze sun knocker, had sloshed muddy water over onto the fresh-painted boat and called Bernie a foul, horrid name. In retaliation, she’d leapt onto the riverbank and punched him, so hard she heard his nose go _snap_. He went scurrying off back up the lane, holding in his blood and wailing, his rabbit dæmon loping on after him.

None of them had noticed the great black bird clinging to the gutter over Juxton Street, but as soon as the boy was gone, it spread its wings and descended on her so quickly that its talons tore at her cheek before she could raise her arms against them. Then it was gone, sailing away up into the sky. Up and up it went, until it was just a black fly, a black flea, a speck of black dust on a pale blue field.

“That was a dæmon,” Bernie had said. She figured him to know, since his dæmon was male, same as him, and that makes a person strange wise - or so she’d heard.

“Where’s its person?” she asked, horrified, wiping at the blood. Her heart throbbed a little, and her own dæmon, Fornax, crept into her collar in the shape of a field mouse. The answer hovered at the edge of her mind, just out of reach. There was a word, she knew, or the story of a word, which would explain it all if she could only grasp it.

Then Bernie said,

“ _Witch_ ,” and it all fell into place.

There were times after that she was tempted to think that they’d made a child’s error and that it was no real dæmon at all, just some vicious black bird. But as the scratch on her cheek hardened into a scar, Fornax took on the form of a ragged brown hawk and never changed again. Clearly, she told Bernie, the witch’s dæmon had been in Jericho for some great reason, though the two of them, still being children, could not parse out what it could be.

She did not see it again until the summer she turned eighteen. Bernie was working in the kitchens of Jordan College by then, keeping an eye out for it in the winters. The red headed boy and his crooked nose still lived in Juxton Street, coming to and fro from the river with his bucket, but he had grown tall and stocky. He was hardly a boy then, the way she was barely a girl anymore - not since the previous Horse Fair, anyway, when Anthony Costa had bought her a whirl of pink spun sugar and laid sticky kisses on her in the bushes behind Johan Verhoeven’s caravan.

It was Anthony Costa who’d shown her how to scale the wall in the graveyard of St Barnabas’ Church in Jericho and Anthony Costa they sought out soon as they saw the great, dark bird nestled in the gutters over Juxton. The Costas did crabbing business on the Bristol coast most winters, and their wool nets were thick and heavy. Well suited to catching prey.

The three of them knew, in some place, that what they were doing was wrong. But in that last gasp of innocence, clinging still to adolescence - and rebellion and anger - none of them spoke against the plan.

The witch’s dæmon did not notice that he was being watched in the day. When night fell, he flapped inelegantly up to the terracotta rooftops over the street and took roost with a flock of sleeping blackbirds for camouflage.

Bernie stayed on the ground, his spaniel dæmon alert for sounds of intrusion, while she and Anthony climbed up onto the church roof and made their way across the eaves. She had filled her pockets with breadcrumbs and took a handful then to scatter across the tiles. In an instant, the blackbirds were awake, thrown into black-feathered chaos by the appearance of food. The dæmon paused a moment, startled, and in that moment they struck.

“Now!” she shouted to Anthony Costa and the net came down.

“Hold still!” he cried, pulling a boning knife from his boot and holding it out so that it flashed in the moonlight. The dæmon was in a panic, flapping its wings and crying out for his witch. At the sight of the knife it only wept all the more.

“Hush!” Mary told it, inching towards the net. “Hush now! We mean no harm. We just want to talk!”

“Savages!” the dæmon shrieked. “Gyptian savages! This is a grievous crime!” Anthony tugged the net down.

“We’ve heard worse than that,” he said.

In the street below, a light suddenly appeared, and a young woman with sleek, dark hair came out of the shop with the bronze sun-shaped knocker. The witch’s dæmon fell silent at once and Mary felt something more compel her to be quiet and still and hidden, even in the dark. The young woman paused at the door and spoke quietly to her dæmon, a golden monkey, before moving away.

“Pull off this net, Mary Johansen,” said the witch’s dæmon, “and I will speak with you.” Anthony’s fox dæmon growled, low in its throat.

“How’s it know your name, Mary?” he asked.

“I dunno,” she told him, “how?”

“I have been watching this street for a long time,” said the dæmon. “My witch has an interest in it.”

“Why?” said Anthony. “What interest has a witch in this bit of the world?”

“Why have you trapped me in this way?” asked the dæmon. “If you must kill me, do it fast, else my witch will come and put an arrow in your throat.”

“Witches don’t come round here,” Anthony Costa smiled. “They only float in cold air. My grand-da said-”

“Why are you here?” Mary pushed. “Is it that shop? What happens in there?” she asked.

“The alchemist matters little to me,” said the dæmon. “Let me free.” _Alchemy_ , she thought. Like a word for conjuring spirits.

“It’s that boy, ain’t it?” She wondered why she had not thought of such a thing before. “What’s with him?”

“Can you not guess it?” said the dæmon. “You will know the pain, soon enough. You will understand.”

“He ain’t her son, is he?” she said. “He is!”

The bird dæmon fell silent. In the darkness, he was depthless and ragged, giving nothing away.

“It ain’t, Mary,” Anthony told her. “It’s got witch oil in him - he’ll lie about anything you tell it.”

“Take off the net and we shall talk,” the bird dæmon repeated.

“I thought witches didn’t have sons,” Mary went on, ignoring him.

“I heard they leaves out to die in the frost,” Anthony Costa told her. “Or worse - they get sucked dry by snow beasts and armoured bears.” The dæmon flapped his wings in anguish at the nonsense and they laughed.

“A curse on you!” the bird shrieked. “A freeze upon your blood!” Anthony cinched the net tighter.

“No wonder you tried to scratch our eyes out,” her dæmon said suddenly, from his place on her shoulder and she felt a strange pull on her heart, as if he were straying away from her. The understanding came thick and fast, suddenly, and she felt tears stab in her eyes.

“Oh!” she said, “You was just protecting him for her.” She sat back on her heels. “Let him free, Anthony. He’s only frightened. He won’t hurt.”

Anthony began to argue, but quickly stopped. He found the weights in the net and pulled it back. Without a word, the witch’s dæmon took off into the sky, black rag on indigo paint, then black on black on black and away. For a few moments they remained, gazing upwards in silence.

“Can witches make curses?” she asked Anthony, afterwards. _You will know the pain, soon enough_ , echoed in her mind, but she wouldn’t show fear.

“They ain’t gods,” he said, with a shrug. “Is they?”

She married Anthony Costa the next year on the last day of the Horse Fair, in a wide skirt to hide her growing belly. It was a late frost that caught them in the fens that April. The river froze solid in the night and when she woke in dire pain, there was not a God in Heaven who could get the Costas’ canary-yellow narrowboat to budge. Tony was born screaming, right there on the floorboards and it was another three days before they could get him to a doctor in Cambridge, who turned him upside down and told her, “why yes, Mrs Costa, he’s a stouthearted little boy.”

It was an odd process, watching her first son grow into a person; perhaps that was the pain she was meant to know, though it gave her more joy than misery, truth be told. What was odder still was her own transformation into ‘mother’, the way stories built up on her tongue and her black hair took on the scent of gingerbread, all without her realising. Tony asked the same questions she once did and she found herself withholding the answers, grooming him to be curious, and hungry, and brave. Instead, she tells him  _north of here, the woods are full of witches and maybe, child, someday you’ll meet with one_ or _and if you don’t clean this mess up, I shall send you up to them. You know, Tony Costa, that they eat little boys._

There’s no witch oil in such a breed of lies, she assures herself. They are the sort her mother once told her, the sort she tells the child Lyra now, even before she starts listening.

There’s a gentle practice in deceiving one’s own child in order to stay his questions (and an even gentler one when it comes to raising someone else’s child), the same way there’s a poetry to learning, at a point, that one’s own parents were occasionally full of shit. She did not want to deprive her son of that particular lesson, the way she hopes to save Lyra from it.

So she safeguards the truth, so that one day these children might understand the potency of stories.

That’s her role in this cosmic drama. Like how the river keeps moving, pushing forwards and forever onwards, down towards the sea and back again.

She was pregnant again the winter they were travelling east from the sea to Norfolk, tugging twelve crates of seal leather towards Ely. The swollen fens sink low there - lower than the ocean, even. They reached the lock at the marsh edges just as the sun was setting the sky on fire. She did not even walk up from the stove to get a look out the window as they went, so routine it was. Then the gas engine cut out and Tony came stumbling back inside.

“Ma,” he said, walking towards her grim-faced and careless, ten years old then, his long arms swinging, his dæmon a grey bush rabbit. “They’s gotta search the boat.”

Her hand moved to shield her stomach, instinctively. She could hear mens’ heavy footsteps on the decks outside and Anthony’s voice. The engine shut off.

“Tony, go sit on your cot,” she told him, and he read her tension and he did as he was told. She poured him a cup of soup and gave him a sea-biscuit and he ate, quiet-like, while the men came in with their sniffing dæmons and stomped up and down the whole of the longboat. They opened the crates and checked around in the dank seal leathers, looking for stolen goods. They came up short.

“The lock’s closed,” Anthony said, when they had gone and the floor was littered with footprints. “They says we gots to turn back round.” She gave him a look, feeling her jaw go loose.

“Did they find something?” she asked. He shook his head. Of course they didn’t find anything - they’d be dragging him off like they did poor Benjamin if that were the case.

“Don’t matter that we’re trading fair,” Anthony said. “I heard them saying that all the fen-ways is closed and being watched.”

“That’s a load of horseshit,” she started up. “How are we meant to get through if they’ve closed up everything?” There’s not a river in East Anglia doesn’t pass through the fens. If the fens are shut, what happens to the Zaal? What comes of their meeting place? - the closest thing to a homeland.

“I don’t know,” Anthony said, “but I’ve a mind to get back to Covey tonight, if we can. There must be someone there knows what’s happenin’.”

It was in Covey the next morning that they got the news - that there was a new law on the king’s tabletop, waiting to be signed. It meant to limit crime on England’s rivers by squeezing them shut and sifting through narrowboats.

The Watercourse Bill crashed into their lives that day, like a lit match dropped into a hay patch.

It made her mad to think, then, of how the law of the land could think to hold back something so constant as water. In the night, she dreamt sharp memories of the witch’s dæmon and how they held it down inside that net. _A freeze upon your blood_ , he said, and it was rivers that were her blood.

In Covey, she sold on the seal leather to a group of sailors setting sail for Trollesund and figured to ask them how they might handle a narrowboat on the open sea. It might have just come to that - sailing straight into the German Ocean and aiming for the avenue where the Nenn River meets the waves - had Anthony not come back from the pub with Martin van Poppel, Tobias Rokeby and good news.

“Tobias’ heard from a trader in Lynn there’s some lord or other near Ipswich’s letting gyptians sail through on his land,” he reported.

“Lord?” she said, eyebrow cocked. “There a charge?”

“None we’ve heard,” says Martin van Poppel. “Name’s Asriel. Seems a kindhearted sort.”

A laughable thought, now, of course.

Lord Asriel rides up to the main house once a fortnight, always with his face set like a jailhouse wall. She can hear his black-horsed carriage coming almost a mile away, so starved is the countryside of other sounds. He brings her rations of flour and eggs and butter for bread-making, as if he were a merchant’s boy, and leaves out a roll of gold coins the size of her thumb on the table in the kitchen.

She makes sure to count them out each time before he leaves again, not because she don’t think he’s good for it, but because it’s been eight months now when he said it’d only be six. She starts to worry that he means to hire her as a mother more than a nurse now, and keep his daughter hidden away forever. If that’s the case, she’d rather take the baby away on the river and be back with her own people.

Never before has she encountered a child so utterly determined to be angry. She’s a storm in swaddling clothes and her dæmon’s always shaped into some scratching, biting curious thing. A year spent on the rocking water and in butterfly-full air will quench the fire in her, give her the leftover love she needs.

Asriel holds her sometimes, but most often he leaves her crawl across the carpet towards him. She makes disjointed grabs at his snow leopard’s tail and tumbles, tooth first, into the floor.

“No word yet, Mrs Costa?” he asks, picking up his child and dusting her off. Her dæmon bites at her lion-yellow hair and she screeches in delight.

“No word?” she repeats, misunderstanding. Is he asking her for a message or his daughter’s development? Lyra starts to cry and the sound sends her father off. He and the snow leopard are gone in the flap of a fur cloak and the carriage is rolling away up the road.

The dust takes a long time to settle afterwards, as if it has a choice in how to fall down.

It’s one great thing about the water life - that things move slow. Things dissipate, they are trusted to the currents. At any one time there are about a hundred gyptian families floating free in the bloodstreams of England. The quiet life suits them most days, when long hours are spent traveling at the speed of swimming ducks and children raid strawberry bushes without ever straying far. But it’s another thing in times of crisis.

Lord Asriel did not oversee their passage through his Ipswich estates. They tug-tugged into the private waterway in the late evening but no one came to see them go, save for a bent old service man in a waxy raincoat, waving a lantern in the coming fog. The river was so narrow through the bullrushes that the boats had to go through one by one, like a pale pageant in the darkness. Tony climbed up to the cockpit as they passed by the house. His eyes went wide and round as dinner plates, seeing the manicured lawns, the milky-stones, the small zeppelin craft moored by the horse stables.

She held onto him tight, bringing him into her lap to keep him warm. His dæmon became a cricket and ran about inside his clothes so that he wriggled against her. It took half the night for the boats to pass out of Asriel’s lands. As dawn began to blossom, they emptied out into the River Orwell and saw the dim glow of Colchester in the distance. Relief bloomed in her stomach, then. The baby started to kick.

The witch’s dæmon came often to mind that season as they sought out answers and supporters in government. How simple it would be, she’d think, to send out one’s dæmon as a messenger, summoning gyptians from all the corners of the land to convene on the Thames in time for May Day.

As a girl she had pondered the final shape her dæmon had taken, and now, at thirty, she was still at a loss to figure why Fornax had settled on a hawk. When it had first happened it had thrown her into a dizzying crisis of mind. Long had the water flowed in her, the way there was earth in some people and fire in others. It gave her energy and urgency, yet here was her dæmon, her own self, made for soaring in the air. She had ultimately supposed it was because they were a wilder sort of person, self-raised and sharp-tongued - and fierce,  more than anything.

It was in the season of the Watercourse Bill that the sense of it finally came to her.

They moored their narrowboat in the Thames that winter with all the representatives John Faa could ultimately muster from the five great gyptian families. The riverside became a patchwork quilt of carnival colours and painted flowers from Tyburn to Westminster; sunflower yellows, deep greens, and bright scarlets. There was never a more comforting sight.

The men took stock to the markets and advanced to the river inns after dark. Some of them crept away to the Ministry to see about snatching up rosters full of the names of new allies and fresh enemies. Gyptian wars have always been fought on the banks and the boat-boards before, never in Parliament.

The women remained, watching night descend over the fat, smoky city and putting their children to bed. They were very still, there on the river. Holding their breath. Waiting for the blade to swing down. It struck her then, with the smell of coal fumes and the blur-buzz of zeppelins overhead, that what she feared was the being restrained. Not the lack of motion itself, but the forced fact of stillness.

She does not like it - the trapped feeling. She did not like it then, with the rivers closed to them, same as she does not like it now with Fornax on her shoulder, nipping at the rings in her ear, and the both of them encircled in silence and hard, flat land. Her blood demands motion. It’s why she has wings at all times.

There were no women allowed in Parliament, so she and the other boatwives bid their time rotating through the market squares, buying up gasoline cans and telling stories to each others children. The landlopers might keep them out, but there’s plenty to be seen and done while tending the home fires.

They locate the king’s advisor, easy. He was a puffed up man, all tall and slender-faced, with hair soot-black and eyes too small for his features. Like match-heads, waiting to be struck. He moved with serpentine grace in his black silk, the way politicians do in gossip and jokes, as if his feet never touched the ground. His dæmon was beautiful - a halcyon, with shock-blue wings and a beak like a sword. His carriage came up to Parliament each morning and he’d walk in and glance in the direction of the assembled narrowboats as if he were surveying a dying tree in need of burning down.

“His name is Edward Coulter,” Anthony told her the following night, with fresh fish frying on the hob. “He’s a nasty, numerical sort.” He looked down the table at Tony to explain. “Got a number for everything, he has. How many orphans left hungry after the Horse Fairs, how many murders in the water taverns - all that. Anything bad there is to say, he’ll say it.” He grunted, and folded up his hat into quarters out of frustration.

“Have we any defenders at all in court?” she asked him.

“John Faa says Lord Asriel’s procured enough witnesses to say we’s a helpful presence in English towns - that we shift sales and all. Says he can prove Coutler’s numbers are forged,” Anthony said. “If they even is forged, that is, though I believe it makes no difference to him.” It’s a fair enough wager to say they ain't - they’re a habitually criminal race, but only because there’s no other way to live when shops turn you away from food and doctors won’t see you for less than thrice their rate.

“Lord Asriel?” she echoed, out of surprise rather than disapproval. "Him again?" The baby kicked in her stomach then and reminded them that, at least, they still had family to call their own.

At that time, she often wondered why Asriel did as he did. Now, she wonders if he ain’t got a gift for presage wisdom, same as her cousin can do. His Stelmaria’s not his sex, but there’s look in his lion eyes makes her think, sometimes, he knows more than anyone else in the whole world.

Long time ago, she would’ve thought to call that witch oil.

“He ain’t a fil-an-thro-pissed, no. It’s the network he wants,” Martin van Poppel said, in the second week of the hearing. “He owns property all through the country. Having a friend in gyptian-kind’d be a good asset to a man like that.”

She supposed that was true. There was always a land owner here or there with a request for a passing narrowboat. To look in on a rival’s crop field, or report back on certain fair maidens and if they were yet married, and things such as that.

Lord Asriel came down to the waterfront one evening with the gyptian king. She had been hunting for Tony in the White Hall Market after he’d scampered off. She’d found him with one hand disappearing into the pocket of a well-dressed woman with a sheet of thick, dark hair who was inspecting a bronze sextant at the corner of the Haymarket. In a second, she’d ripped her son away, just as the woman’s dæmon looked up.

Her breath stopped short. The dæmon was a golden monkey, and the woman was turning around. Quick as a flash, she pushed Tony through the crowd and plunged after him back to the river. It took her some hours to recover why it was that her lungs had caught at the sight of the woman. She managed to trace only the semblance of a memory. It was then that Anthony invited Lord Asriel and John Farr down into the cockpit to smoke poppy heads and drink jenniver.

It was an odd position in which to first encounter such a man, considering their eventual future together.

He was sat, hands extended towards the warm grill. His dæmon was laid out across the stern, white snow against the black of the river. Mary stood and poured them wine, and John Faa said, “Anthony here tells me the baby’s due in the time of the Horse Fair.”

“Just before, Lord Faa,” she said, gracious for the fact.

“Are you hoping for a girl?”

She touched her stomach, overtly conscious of this stranger in her boat, filling up her space with his land-loper legs and his rich man’s clothes, listening in on conversations that were none of his business.

“A girl’d be nice,” she replied, and the gyptian king gave her the motion of his blessing.

It was Billy they got, instead. He came in May, just before the Fair, with the news that the Watercourse Bill had been put to death in court. She felt full up of pure water and sunlight, washed clean from a bad season. He was a quiet baby, and a good deliverance from the dark shadow that had hung over them all winter.

That summer there was not much business in the Oxford meadows for the buying and selling of horses. Lord Asriel’s witnesses, she would come to know, had been indentured via debts owed to him by the boards of various colleges. Power’s a magnet, after all, and he could draw rich and wise men, however unwillingly, like iron. As such, the Scholars and the Deacons and the Masters kept their distance from the canal that summer, as if they if their good testimonies, that the gyptians had only ever been a cultural, economic blessing to Oxford, had left them burned or bitter. It was no matter, though. The gyptians were too relieved to mind, and they sailed away for the free fen-lands soon as the summer was through.

She became gradually aware, however, that they were now being watched, and their progress tracked. At first she dismissed the worry as a side-effect of new motherhood, a need to protect her child from the fear that had rattled through their community while in London. But, in time, the signs became more pronounced. She could not miss them.

There were sailors in Covey and Kingston who sought them out with keen and deliberate purpose. At times, there were symbols drawn in mud on the outside of the boat, as if they were being used as a form of communication from town to town. Once, she found Tony talking with an old, thin man at the harbour point in Bristol who had asked him where it was they were heading next. As punishment, she’d given him a smack on the back of his skull and told him not to go chatting to strangers again.

It was an unnerving presence. Heavy, like a corset. She was used to watching out, seeing towns and cities change and families fluctuate with the rhythm of the tide through the little round window in the side of the boat, but now the world was watching back and it disturbed her deeply.

The reason of it became apparent when they were in Tewkesbury, trading tobacco leaf in February. She was laying out clothes to dry over the edge of the narrowboat in the weedy sunlight when a man approached her.

“Mother Costa?” he asked and Fornax almost shrieked with surprise. She stood up straight, her shoulders thrust back like wings.

“What is it?” she demanded, putting her hands on her hips.

“Would you accompany me, please?” He was a dry little creature, slope-backed and bright-eyed, with a thinning beard the colour of ash. His dæmon was pinscher dog, so she felt safe assuming he must have been someone’s servant. The pinscher was a sleek, shiny beast though, so he must have been a wealthy sort of servant.

“Tony,” she called into the cabin. “Watch your brother.”

She went with the man across the Mythe Bridge to a pub on the water with flood-rot up to the window sills. Lord Asriel sat within, neither drinking nor eating, yet dominating the place all the same. She ought to have been surprised to see him, but, somehow, she was not.

“Mrs Costa,” he said, getting to his feet. “I am glad to see you in good health. How is your child?”

“He’s well, I thank you,” she said, eyes narrowed. “As to you, mi’lord.”

“None of that here,” he responded, clipped, without looking about. There were four or five other men seated in the public house, but none seemed to pay them much mind. Lord Asriel was dressed in travelling clothes. He did not appear to be a wealthy man there. “Would you come upstairs?” he asked. “There is some urgent business at hand I fear requires your pity.”

At this, Fornax gave a short, offended shriek. It seemed as if he were mocking her. She glanced from his servant to his pale, fearsome dæmon.

“What’s this about?”

“Have you heard,” Lord Asriel said, “that there has been an air ship crash in Holland today? My brother and his wife were on board. The Count and Countess Belacqua”

“I’m awful sorry for that loss,” she told him, catching on to something in the water now, "but we don't hear much of air-traffic in our circles." In time, they side-stepped enough around the truth of the matter that her curiosity taxed her to accompany them up the stairs.

In a little room towards the back of the house, a baby was tucked up asleep in the long sleeve of Lord Asriel’s coat. It’s dæmon was a jewel beetle, resting on her chin.

“My niece,” the great man said. The snow leopard climbed up onto the bed and curled up around the tiny child. From beneath the baby’s bonnet came see a lock of fair, lion-hide hair. She was a desperately young thing, hardly more than a week old.

“Your niece,” she repeated.

To anyone who mattered - that is to say, men and sundry male officials - the story passed as unquestioned truth. The baby had a silver rattle and an embroidered hood. She looked to be the child of someone distinguished. She looked to have Asriel’s colouring about her, but, then, Mary had never seen his brother, the Count Belacqua, before, so perhaps it was a trait they shared.

But she was small - smaller, even, than her Billy had been. Her skin was still petal soft. And she was so young - too young to leave behind. Any consumate mother could see.

“She is in need of a nurse,” Lord Asriel said, and, finally, the purpose of her visit became clear.

“You don’t know any other nurses, mi’lord?” she said, gruffly, though she meant to be blithe.

“None appropriate,” he replied, and she looked up.

“She ain’t a gyptian looking thing. She’d not pass on board my boat - we’d be fingered for kidnappers!”

“I do not mean to ask you to take her on board.”

“I’ll not leave my children,” she snapped, as that was the next logical assumption.

Lord Asriel straightened up. She saw him expand, like a morning’s shadow. She did not want to fear him, and yet she felt she easily could.

“Your children have many parents,” he said, and held out a hand towards the baby. “This one has none.”

She glared at him. Her heart stung, some.

“None,” she repeated. Like a catechism.

He promised her enough money to make her listen a little longer. To his marginal credit, Lord Asriel did not threaten her pride until she was determined to go. He reminded her of the time and the money spent fighting the Watercourse Bill, and wasn’t it the gyptian way to repay such debts?

She was offended by his dishonesty regarding the child’s origins, and yet she felt unable to drag it out of him.

“I have an estate just outside Rugby,” he told her. “You and the child will be comfortable there, until I can arrange a separate means of insuring her care.”

“What’s the name?” she asked him.

“The name?”

“The child’s name. What is it?”

“She’s Lyra.”

So, then: the cottage. She and the baby made a flight by moonshine out of Tewkesbury and into the country. The road rolled beneath them like a sick horse, and she was sore in her hips and bereft when morning came. The place was full of light and dust when they arrived, and she spent the first three weeks sweeping and wiping away the musty ghosts.

Asriel’s visits punctuated the grey, slow life. In time, she wound it out of him. The whole bloody business of it. How it was the wife of old Edward Coutler he fell into bed with; how she abandoned the baby once she was born too fierce to pass convincingly for a politician’s child.

She sees the ink of deception at work in the growing child, slipping in her blood, digging in her bones. Her parents are liars and adulterers and abandoners - charmingly noxious humans, like hot stars burning; regal forms made weak flesh. Their daughter is not unlike them. Lyra screams, howls and laughs in quick succession. As she starts to totter up and down the floor, she pulls down tablecloths and laundry lines. Her fingers are tough, sinuous things. Her dæmon takes on the form of a fairy wren most often, singing proud and boisterous from the rim of the cradle, irritating Fornax by flying circles about him.

But, overwhelmingly, she is pitiable. Loveable. Increasingly, she’s full of joy; a fire spirit in tiny form. This bright, loud child trapped in a grey, static world.

At the very least, they have one another.

She wakes to the sound of a horse, charging head-long down the country road.

Strange, she thinks, sleepily.

There is just the one bedroom in the cottage and the baby sleeps there in her cot beside her, the way her own children did. Slowly, she gets up out of bed and goes to the window. The world outside the little cottage is blanketed in darkness, save for the hazy illumination of the moon. Cold seeps out through the glass, and in the low light she sees the horse - the white horse - gallop into view.

Fear shoots down to the soles of her feet.

She twists, fast as a bat, and picks Lyra up out of her cot. God bless, she doesn’t wake, nor cry. Her dæmon stirs, dozy in the blankets in the form of an ermine.

There had been some discussion as to what she might do if a thing like this were to happen. If someone comes to the cottage door, she’s to say that she’s the housekeeper and Lyra’s the work of her own womb. But this ain’t some curious visitor, not in the middle of the night. This is someone fresh charged with fury.

She doesn’t dare light a candle. Her feet know this cottage well enough in the dark these days as there’s little else to do but retrace her steps all day. Still, with care, she pads into the kitchen where the pale tiles give off the idea of light.

There’s a rustle in the dark. A scream - a cry. She hears the rider swing down onto the hard packed earth and move towards the house. She don’t dare rise to peek again through the glass. This cottage is too small to hide in.

She finds the kitchen door and slips outside. At the same time, the rider comes in. She hears him shouting out, Asriel! and hears his boots squeak on the tiles.

For a moment, her heart lurches down towards the river, but a shrivelled waterway is no rescue. Fornax rises up, almost silent in the air, his night-sharp eyes focused through the glass.

“It’s him!” he hisses into her ear, and without a name she knows who.

The moon’s pale glow electrifies the meadows and the grass. She had not seen this place in such detail before now, each blade of barley and curled petal. There’s a vague beauty to it that her raging mind seeks to notice, but the place remains unchanged. Empty of escape or oasis.

There is the main house. There is that. In a maze of rooms and service doors, she could buy them both some time. With the babe still silent in her arms, they could even hide for hours.

With shaking steps she stumbles through the long grass towards the deep shadow of the manor. A world that seemed so dark from the warmth of her bed now feels full of movement and light. She feels utterly conspicuous - white night gown, white child. She runs faster. Splinters gather under her fingers as she strikes at the oak-wood door. It gives way like a slice of chalk and moonlight spills into the space.

“He’s coming!” Fornax is shrieking, but she doesn’t dare look back. “He has a gun!”

The manor smells of rotted roses and baby’s breath. She tastes her heart in her throat. Lyra starts to cry. Her little dæmon is become a mole, scratching and tearing at her night clothes, rooting around in the darkness. It may be nothing, but she fears she hears something behind her.

Her neck twists then. In the moony gaze, she sees the turquoise flash of kingfisher wings.

How it is she comes to find the closet beside the stairs, she cannot later recall. A black curtain falls over her memory. A blindness elected by her panic and the outright screaming of the baby in her ear. She remembers a dash past the window, the glint of gold outside, and the roar of a leopard. Then the dark again. The soft, thick, velvet dark of the coat cupboard and the white hot crying of the little girl in her arms.

Fornax sinks his talons into her shoulder, stilling his wings from flapping aimlessly against the cold, stone walls and the fur coats. The pain forces her focus. Lyra shrieks and wails enough for them both so she tugs her close and presses her in towards her heart, as if her flesh might shield her. Outside, there is shouting. There is cursing the like of that which reminds her of home. The water. The quiet. And then comes the shot.

Edward Coulter’s bullet pierces the wooden door, just near the hinge, and scores the stone wall, throwing pale sparks into the gloom. Behind her, the wood sags a little, almost, she fears, as if her spine has given way. There is comfort, though, in the solidity of the walls. In the hardness of the ground beneath her. Still solidity never contained a heartbeat before now, but everything beats and pulses, as if she were in a womb.

She sways. In this close, warm blackness, borne out on the eruption of chaos, with a child at her breast, she might as well be in the confines of a narrowboat. Never mind that the child has none of her blood; she has all her love and her time and her frustration fed in her after these long months together. She lets Lyra scream. Her father is here now, playing his part.

Through the bullet-gap she sees the white snow leopard. The halcyon dæmon slashes at her with its daggering beak. Turquoise feathers fly. Men grunt. There’s passion rife in it.

And then the second shot - the one that hit Edward Coulter between the eyes.

And then the silence, and the smell of the blood.

Lord Asriel, that great deceiver, exhales in the hall beyond. She can hear him waiting, like a lion beyond the door. There’s no relief that washes through her, just the same still burning wish to be home. Maybe now she will go home. Maybe she will take Lyra with her. She puts her hand on the door and the stale, bloody air rushes in, like she could take off on feathers and flee.

His voice cuts the shadows.

“Come out, Mrs Costa, and bring the baby.”

**Author's Note:**

> A large inspiration behind this was the story contained in 'Lyra's Oxford' (the little red book, for those unaware. It's small, precious and full of apocrypha - you could read it in an afternoon!) The witch's dæmon (Ragi) and the red-haired boy in Juxton Street are derived from that story. He is the son of the witch Yelena Pazhets, who ultimately grows up to become a soldier and perish as part of Asriel's forces. I wanted to weave in a bit of that history in order to bring home the idea of 'watching over' certain children. Hopefully, the fic as a whole is not misleading without having read this added tale!
> 
> Similarly, Lord Asriel's role is hemmed in by way of the quote from TNL/TGC: " _It were Lord Asriel who allowed gyptian boats free passage on the canals through his property. It were Lord Asriel who defeated the Watercourse Bill in Parliament, to our great and lasting benefit... You forgotten that? Shame, shame on you, shame._ " (Ch.8)
> 
> [Also, strictly speaking, I _think_ there's a third, middle Costa brother - Kerim - but, uh... I couldn't fit him in. So... sorry dude!]
> 
> Also, humongously useful (and wonderful) were Pullman's Lantern Slides, which provided the relationship between the Costas and Bernie, the pastry cook at Jordan College, as well as the info about gyptians painting flowers onto their narrowboats (originally found in the HDM Omnibus re-issue, and [here](http://theaurorarp.b1.jcink.com/index.php?showtopic=497) online), and the map of the Oxford of Lyra's world, contained in the above book (found [here](http://bridgetothestars.net/misc_gallery/albums/Extras/LO-Extras/scan0024__.jpg)).


End file.
